Frederick Buechner

"(Friends who) had entered the part of me where my dreams come from, and although a number of years have gone by since then, some of them come ambling through my dreams still." Frederick Buechner, "Now and Then"

Your dreams tell you when you've become attached to someone. I love Buechner. Even his prosaic accounts are beautifully written and full of insight and imagery. One problem resides with him, though: You can't talk about him with friends because nobody really knows how to pronounce his name. Even people who have heard it pronounced in the media are likely to have heard a handful of different pronunciations. So, after much trouble and exhaustive investigation, I hereby reveal the correct pronunciation: FRO-derick.

By special request

Here's that toon you asked for Pat. "Reality Check" by Doug Whammond.

Mark 12:19

" 'Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. ...' "

This comes from the well-known passage in which the Sadducees use a hypothetical to challenge Jesus and try to disprove the resurrection. Here is the footnote to this verse from the Reformation Study Bible, edited by R.C. Sproul: "The story they tell to Jesus is based on the 'kinsman-redeemer' law of Deut. 25:5-10, which provides for a family line to be perpetuated by the nearest of kin in the event of a premature death."

Wow! The kinsman-redeemer, especially as seen in Boaz, is a type of Christ, the true Bridegroom. The Sadducees try to trip up Jesus with a passage about Himself! Well He said, "Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?" As Luke 24:27 attests, truly all of Scripture is about Him and no other.

What's going on in there?

Winsor McCay lived in the land of dreams and nightmares, so it's no surprise (to me, anyway) that not only did he use that as fodder for his comic strips but also imagined a world where drawings come alive. His masterpiece, "Little Nemo in Dreamland," always featured fantastic adventures of Nemo and his friends, followed by a sudden awaking upon the floor next to his bed, his mother always wondering what all the noise is about. The beauty and imagination of his drawing is still unsurpassed in the funny papers.

Not only did he draw wonderfully, but he was fast. As inventor of animation, he drew all his cartoons by himself, each frame a complete, stand-alone drawing. His first experiment was based on Little Nemo, and consisted of 4,000 drawings, all penciled, inked and colored by himself. His technical achievements were not his only claim to fame here, though, because he also gave his characters personality, no mean trick in silent film, a lesson many cartoon studios could well learn today. One of the most fascinating animated films he made was a documentary-style treatment of the sinking of the Lusitania.

QotD

"But there were others (who worked in East Harlem), the regular parish staff, who gave their lives to it. They didn't just work with the poor. They lived with them. ... There were times when you couldn't escape the feeling that, no matter how hard they fought against it, they thought of themselves as a kind of spiritual elite and of all other types of Christian service as comparatively irrelevant. There were times when their lightness of heart seemed forced and artificial and when their total immersion in the life of the ghetto seemed to border on the perverse. There were occasional glimpses of bitterness, envy, dissemblance among them ..."

Frederick Buechner, "Now and Then"

Buechner is not gratuitously bashing people who can't defend themselves here; he goes on to call them closer to saints than anyone he had ever known. Statements like this make me look at the attitude I take toward my own walk and service. It hit me hard.

Song of Feallengod

Lift high your shoulders, take the red seal,
Establish the mighty king’s strength.
The distant shadow of deep despair’s hope
Knows not height, neither breadth, neither length.
Bend hard under blows, lift high ev’ry head,
One day Gægnian’s door 'ere life’s losing.
Thorns pierce the flesh on the road's compelled walk,
But for one, and that of his choosing.

Writer's block